What are the easiest languages to learn for English speakers?

November 21, 2018

Travelling around the world is no longer the privilege of the rich. With the advent of budget airlines, air miles and Airbnb, anyone can travel to their dream destination. Although English is widely spoken around the world, it is not present everywhere. If you know at least a little bit of the local language, it would be a great help in your travels and give you a better chance to interact with the local population.

As an English speaker, it will not be easy to master just any other language. But there are a few languages that you can master easily if you know English. Here are the top languages you can learn easily if you speak English.

1.Africaans

Africaans is close to English. They both have come from the West Germanic family of languages. If you memorise a few words, you can construct sentences easily. English speakers will find the phonetics comfortable except for the ‘g’ in Africaans is pronounced as ‘ch’. Grammar will not be an issue since it is not an inflective language, and it does not have conjugation.

2.Norwegian

Pronunciations in Norwegian is quite familiar to English speakers. Verb forms are easy to learn and past tense is easy to create by simply adding an ‘e’ suffix. Grammar rules are much simpler compared to English. In fact, if you were to read Norwegian, you can get the gist of the text without even knowing the language. While spellings are slightly different, you can figure out the meaning by pronouncing the words. Sentence structuring is quite similar to English and you won’t have to worry about the accent as the language has a lot of different accents in Norway.

3.Swedish

Another language from the Germanic family, Swedish shares some of its vocabulary with English. While pronunciation could be a challenge at first, once mastered, you will find the language quite melodic. The syntax structure of Swedish is a bit complicated. But since it follows the English syntax closely, it is an easy language for English speakers.

4.Dutch

After German and English, Dutch is the biggest Germanic language. It sounds like a mix of German and English and they often spell words the same way as English. But there is a difference in the pronunciation that you need to be aware of. Again, due to its nearness to English, these smaller problems can be easily conquered.